Don't Say Geek! Say Syntux!

A bit old but very interesting read on Project Management.

Many project managers feel as if their role is more of a game than a job. Some project managers play to win, some simply wait for the next roll of the dice, and others haven’t got a clue how to play. Many project managers are accomplished at playing the PM game and are able to deliver spectacular results. Others simply don’t know what they’re doing and cannot deliver because they clearly don’t understand the rules of the game.

Once you start playing the “Game of Project Management,” you soon realize that there is never enough money, people, and time, so you have to call on your interpersonal skills to get what you need to get the project delivered.

There are two fundamental aspects regarding the human side of project management that are important to remember:
People influence a project’s success or failure.
A project problem can only be resolved by people.
So, if it’s people that form the core to any project, let’s look at the way many project managers play the people game. A successful end result means everything to project managers. They cannot afford to fail because executives are always looking at two key things:
Who’s putting money into the coffers—i.e., delivering on time, staying within budget, keeping clients happy, etc.
Who’s taking money out of the coffers—i.e. missing milestones, allowing conflict on teams, going over budget, experiencing unhappy clients, etc.
Organizations therefore try and employ project managers that have the ability to deliver. The downside to the political game involves what I call “shark-like” behavior: careerism, scheming, underhanded negotiating for resources, political campaigning, and unscrupulous behavior.

Let me knock down a few myths right from the get-go. Only naïve PMs believe that hard work, mastery of Microsoft Project, and knockout project documents will make you a better project manager. This myopic approach may work for you on small projects, but definitely not on medium to super-size projects, where executives demand instant 360-degree views of budgets, resources, time, and more. So how then do you play this game? You need to be able to:
Understand politics extremely well.
Provide timely communications.
Build relationships.
Provide leadership to your team.
Improve your negotiation skills among others if you are to win.

Read more on TechRepublic

So the verdict is out! You can’t get the most of iPhone OS 4.0 on your iPhone 3G but 3Gs and since I don’t have iPhone 3Gs nor can afford to buy it now or even interested in it anymore, I’m considering installing Android on my iPhone 3G.

None of the blogs I checked confirmed whether it can be usable, it seems to be experimental until now. So if anyone have experience in this, please let me know!

Tags: iPhone, Android

Why burn a disk when you could mount it? and who wants to remember such command to mount an ISO image
[coolcode]mount -o loop -t iso9660 file.iso /mnt/test[/coolcode] not to mention the long list of mount parameters.

Well, I do want to remember such command but I don’t mind having an easy cool tool to mount ISO images.

Gnome ISO Mounter (Gmount-ISO) is a tool that ease for Desktop users the CD Image files (ISO) mounting/unmounting .

Gnome ISO Mounter (Gmount-ISO) package is available under Ubuntu 7.10 repository
[coolcode]
Package: gmountiso
State: installed
Automatically installed: yes
Version: 0.4-0ubuntu2
Priority: optional
Section: universe/utils
Maintainer: Ubuntu MOTU Developers
Uncompressed Size: 168k
Depends: python, python-central (>= 0.5.8), python-glade2, python-gtk2
Suggests: nautilus
Description: This is Gmountiso, a PyGTK GUI to mount your cd images
Gmount-iso is a small tool written using PyGTK and Glade. It allows you to easily mount your cd images. This is a frontend to the ‘mount -o loop -t iso9660
foo.iso /mountpoint’ command

Homepage: http://www.crans.ens-cachan.fr/Syst%C3%A8meLinux/GmountIso
[/coolcode]
and can be easily obtained with aptitude.

[coolcode] sudo aptitude install gmountiso [/coolcode]

Wish you a very happy mounting

Tags: images cd, optional section, iso images, cd images, desktop users, image iso, cachan, gtk2, cd image, iso image, aptitude, image files, glade, gnome, python, foo, repository, parameters, pygtk, developers

Couple of days a friend of mine asked me to recommend a Linux distribution that would play nicely with his old laptop so as usual I recommended Ubuntu to him but I told him to wait couple of days until they release Feisty and that because he have 256 ADSL line but now with this tip he can get it now and sync it later!

Thanks to ubuntu blog for their nice tips and tricks.

UPDATE: Ok, Ubuntu blog removed that post because excessive load caused by rsyncing users would kill the rsync server

Tags: adsl line, old laptop, rsync server, excessive load, image tags, linux distribution, couple of days, tips and tricks, sync, linux, blog

Last week I got call from one of my colleagues complaining about the amount of spam she’s receiving, so I installed SA and implemented some restricted options in postfix

smtpd_recipient_restrictions =
permit_sasl_authenticated,
permit_mynetworks,
reject_unauth_destination,
reject_invalid_hostname,
reject_non_fqdn_hostname,
reject_non_fqdn_sender,
reject_rbl_client list.dsbl.org,
reject_rbl_client cbl.abuseat.org,
reject_rbl_client, dnsbl.sorbs.net,
reject_rbl_client spam.dnsbl.sorbs.net,
reject_rbl_client korea.services.net,
reject_rbl_client zen.spamhaus.org,
reject_rbl_client pbl.spamhaus.org,
reject_rbl_client sbl.spamhaus.org,
permit

but later she called complaining that she cannot send emails using our SMTP server so for me it was what the hell is going one? later I found that Postfix is picky about the order of your options so if you do reject_non_fqdn_hostname before permitting sasl authenticated users, those authenticated will not be able to send emails.

and this was new to me.

Tags: server mail, fqdn, smtp server, spamhaus, sorbs, zen, colleagues, spam, dnsbl, korea, hell, pbl, linux